Just curious as to legality....

[a_Guest03]

I don't think the legality is what you would even worry about. Lots of illegal stuff goes on because people don't have the time and/or money to care.

In accounting, we learned that inventory shrinkage happens due to spoilage, theft, loss of control. The amount of money it takes to control this is greater than the cost of the loss. So you just write it off, instead of going on a crusade to end it.

When eqemu pulls enough PERCENTAGE of SOE or EQ's bundle, they will come for us. It's a matter of being scared of the numbers. I guarantee that Sony makes over $1M/year off EQ. I guarantee that we don't threaten 1% of that.

The costs of the lawyers, and bad PR, and controls to remove every emulator website and prosecute every user is greater than writing off the costs. So why worry until your numbers reach a more frightening state. At about 3% take on their numbers, they may come for us. That's minimum (and a tiny minimum at that) $30k/year lost. Add up every eqemu user who is active. Take into account that they BOUGHT the game, and didn't buy the service. Even if all 30000 users cancelled their accounts, we'd still barely be damaging their profit.

With all the infighting among the eqemu crowd over the past year and a half that I've been following eqemu, I would never have expected it to get this far. I also don't expect it to get attacked by Sony until it is near completion, at which time, it will be too late to stop. Attacking us now would be a crapshoot. Would we have succeeded in emulating live EQ? Would it have competed against the established product. Would it have damaged Sony more than it helped it? I doubt that all of those conditions will be met, even after we're done. So why worry about getting sued. If I were Sony, I wouldn't mess with such a small potatoes group anyway. I'm proud that everyone feels so powerful, but we're close to insignificant to Sony, and I'm glad to be under radar.